Bourbon Street noise ordinance heads to New Orleans City Council

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The latest proposed revisions to New Orleans' loud-noise laws, a subject of negotiations that has bedeviled city officials, musicians and French Quarter residents for years, finally heads to the City Council this week.

But that doesn't mean everyone is completely happy with it.

"These stakeholders will not agree on every word of this ordinance. Some may feel that certain provisions go far, too far, and others not far enough," Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer said Monday (April 21). "This legislation will not fix every problem in the existing code and there may be desire (to extend the proposed law) to other parts of the city besides Bourbon Street. That will be for the administration and the incoming council to consider."

After a broader, citywide overhaul of the noise ordinance put forward by Councilwoman Stacy Head in January collapsed, Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration organized five weeks of talks on this latest rewrite, which targets the bars and clubs of Bourbon Street rather than the city at large. The council's Health and Human Needs Committee picked it up Monday after its public introduction April 10.

Focused on Bourbon Street and immediately adjacent blocks, the new proposal would set lower limits for decibel levels outside bars and clubs; eliminate the longstanding curfew for musicians performing on public streets and decriminalize noise violations, among other changes. It also would roll enforcement of the new regulations into the responsibilities of the Health Department, which has a budget to hire four noise ordinance officers this year.

David Woolworth, a city-hired sound expert with Oxford Acoustics of Oxford, Miss., presented his findings again Monday and called on the council and the mayor to set a timeline to begin implementing the changes.

In his report, Woolworth suggested the levels recorded just
outside Bourbon Street clubs shouldn't go higher than 92 decibels for normal
music sounds and no higher than 102 decibels for low, thumping bass
sounds that can reverberate throughout a neighborhood. He said afterward that this was the first time such low-frequency sounds face regulation in the city.

"We've been kind of in the Stone Age with (noise regulations)," Woolworth said. "It's awesome, that through all this hullabaloo we have progress."

But Nathan Chapman, a French Quarter resident and longtime advocate for a stricter citywide noise ordinance, blasted Woolworth's report as "pro-bar, pro-liquor lobby" and asked the council to implement lower decibel level limits on Bourbon Street than those Woolworth had recommended.

"Bourbon Street will be legally the loudest street in America," Chapman said. "At this volume it will damage the hearing, especially to our service industry people who are in there night after night."

Chapman also expressed concern that several changes in New Orleans' existing noise ordinance, such as lifting the curfew on musicians, inadvertently affect the whole city.

City attorneys in Landrieu's administration, vexed by enforcement issues with the 1956 curfew law that bans musicians from playing on city streets between 8 p.m. and 9 a.m., decided to plan to do away with it all together. The law could be applied to someone playing a trumpet on a street corner, but not to someone blasting music from a boom box on that same corner, Assistant City Attorney Theresa Becher said.

"We decided there were constitutional concerns with that provision," she said. "It's been on the books since 1956, but it's my understanding that it's not been challenged."

To raise more questions about Woolworth's work, a veteran of noise ordinance debates in New York City, psychologist and professor Arline Bronzaft, suggested the council and all the stakeholders return to the negotiating table. Before the meeting, she called the proposal a "hodge-podge" that needed to be reworked and incorporated across the city.

"It isn't a cohesive update of the ordinance," she said.

Bronzaft said she had been monitoring the noise ordinance talks in New Orleans since 2012, and appeared before the committee Monday at the urging of Carol Allen, president of the Vieux Carre Property Owners, Residents and Associates Inc., and Stuart Smith, a French Quarter resident and tort lawyer who have been lobbying for far stricter noise laws.

She criticized the new ordinance's authors for replacing the word "noise" with the less negative-sounding "sound."

"I would be very doubtful to pass something that can't even
decide what the word should be," she said. "Personally, I think it's a noise
ordinance. I agree that's what it was called in 2012. I don't know what
happened. But whatever happened, people here are very confused because the
document you are now voting on, you haven't decided which word to use."

But Hannah Kreiger Benson, spokeswoman for the musicians advocacy group, the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, described the recent negotiations as "transparent and conclusive," and applauded the decriminalization of noise violations and placing enforcement of the new law under the Health Department.

"This draft law is a really good example of what good process can do," she said.

Short on time and resources, the New Orleans Police Department has for years passed on any measurable enforcement of the noise laws already on the books. The new proposal doesn't stop NOPD officers from clamping down on loud venues or street performers, but it does prevent a judge from sentencing a violator to jail time, said Becher, the assistant city attorney.

The Legislature is simultaneously considering a proposal to raise the limits on fines imposed for city law violations from $500 to $5,000. Palmer indicated that noise violations could be on the list of those penalties to be raised.

Palmer also said she plans to introduce an amendment to the latest proposal when the full council takes it up Thursday, a change that would require that it not be implemented until the city hires the Health Department staff to enforce it and first educates residents and businesses about the new regulations.

The civil mood in the council chamber Monday belied the acrimony that has accompanied the noise law debate for the past four years. Still, that comity didn't stop Palmer from lightly chastising Head for skipping the meeting.

"She said that she wanted to be with her family on Easter break, which we can only understand that," Palmer said. "I, as well, have two daughters who are at home today who are also on vacation."